If the market\u2019s attention is shifting from suppliers to customers, a number of US tech giants will be. especially prominent. This is the case for Amazon and Alphabet, among others. The former is the world\u2019s largest cloud provider offers a comprehensive portfolio of AI solutions. AWS saw sales rise 28% to USDbn 37.6 in the first quarter, with CEO Andy Jassy revealing at the same time that AI sales were running at more than USDbn 15 year-on-year. Even more interesting is that Amazon\u2019s own chip business with Graviton, Trainium and Nitro has now reached annualised sales of over USDbn 20. To maintain this pace, Amazon is planning USDbn 200 in additional investment this year, primarily on AI infrastructure. The opportunity is obvious: if companies relocate whole agent and inference workloads to the cloud, Amazon will earn from its platform, data centre, software layer and, increasingly, silicon as well. For its part, Alphabet is combining Google\u2019s consumer business with the growing power of Google Cloud, which alone posted a huge 63% increase in sales in the first quarter. At the same time, Alphabet raised its spending plans for AI data centres to USDbn 190. That this expenditure is not going to waste is clear from demand, with Anthropic, for instance, having committed to spending USDbn 200 on Google Cloud services and chips over the next 5 years.<\/p>\n\n
For a long time Meta was on the outside when talk turned to AI heavyweights. The Facebook owner is now really forcing its way into the conversation, though. After spending USDbn 19.8 on capital investment just in the first quarter, Meta recently upped the total for the year as a whole to USDbn 125 to 145. At the same time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly describes the goal as being the path to \u201cpersonal superintelligence\u201d for billions of users, referencing the first model from the Meta Superintelligence Labs. A further lever has just been added: according to media reports, the company is considering developing a cloud business in order to market surplus AI computing capacity. If it manages to pull this off, Meta would no longer be simply an advertising platform and AI user, but also an infrastructure seller \u2013 exactly the scenario to which the capital markets are responding positively at the moment.<\/p>\n\n